A U.S. migration policy created during the coronavirus pandemic, commonly known as “Title 42,” is set to expire today, ending one of Washington’s most controversial migration-related initiatives but also putting the country on the brink of a worrying surge in border-crossing attempts.
With this in mind — and under pressure from Republican lawmakers — the White House a week ago deployed some 1,500 additional military personnel to the U.S.-Mexico border, considered the heart of a never-ending humanitarian crisis that Title 42 was unable to resolve.
Created in a context of zero tolerance towards migration during the Donald Trump government, Title 42 was invoked in 2020, using the Covid health crisis as the perfect pretext to quickly expel migrants and asylum seekers, without giving them the chance to apply for legal status in the U.S.
Human rights advocates, however, claim that it deprived citizens of the right to seek asylum, provided in both U.S. and international law. To make matters worse, since President Joe Biden took office, NGOs such as Human Rights First have denounced serious abuses of “blocked in or expelled to Mexico under Title 42.”
“The misuse of Title 42 has been a public health, border management, and human rights fiasco,” they say in a report, denouncing “over 13,480 reports of murder, torture, kidnapping, rape, and other violent attacks on migrants and asylum seekers.”
The pandemic-era policy paved the way for more than 2.8 million deportations, sometimes involving the same person repeatedly, according to data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
When elected, Mr. Biden promised to reshape Washington’s migration management, in part by erasing Trump-era policies that kept family members apart. But migration continued to rise across Latin America, forcing the White House to consider alternative policies that ended up expelling thousands of people from Nicaragua, Haiti, and Cuba.
And the numbers could shoot up even more now that Title 42 is coming to an end, as humanitarian visa issuance has recently increased in Mexico and authorities in Panama report record-breaking migration spikes through the Darién jungle corridor.
Search
